Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, November 16, 2013, 02:14 (3814 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: Most forms of panpsychism are theistic,-See my most recent entry about the panpsychism neuro-scientist. He is not a theist.-> dhw: but you've obviously forgotten my atheist alternative. Instead of inexplicably conscious first cause energy, we have non-conscious energy which throughout eternity has transformed itself into matter, and as matter has gone on changing, the energy within it has inexplicably become conscious of change. That consciousness has evolved within the materials it initially gave rise to, and it has continued to evolve through cooperation. No single overall consciousness, but only an infinite number of individual consciousnesses contained within matter, though possibly surviving the disintegration of that matter.-No, I haven't fogotten. It is one of the most convoluted cockamammy (sp?)weird theories I have every come across. Quite an invention to get around a specific first cause.-> 
> dhw: You always try to equate consciousness with self-consciousness. I don't see how it is possible for animals, birds, insects to cope with life unless they are AWARE (conscious) of their environment and of means to cope with it. And so organisms cannot act intelligently without a degree of consciousness (which does not mean self-consciousness). -No, I keep the concept of consciousness in two parts. All those organisms are conscious,not self-aware conscious.-> 
> DAVID: We only know of codes developed by intelligence. Do you know of a code by chance? I don't.[/i]-> 
> dhw: Information is useless unless there is an intelligence that knows how to use it. We are all built of cells, which you say are automatons, and we all have coded DNA. If our independent human intelligence "emerges" from the interactive cooperation of automaton cells, then intelligence may have "emerged" in all forms of life, reaching back to the very formation of DNA. And if intelligence is energy, other organisms may have it too (after all, you believe in animal souls).-Nicely put, talking all around my point. How do you create 'emergent' intelligence. I assume you simply woke up one day and were very intelligent without studying or reading anything. And you are obviously extremely intelligent. Intelligence is developed over time by a plastic brain absorbing knowledge. Intelligenced is the use of developed knowledge.-> 
> DAVID (under "Cell sensing"): Need I note that genes are just big biochemical molecules. Sensing is done biochemically. The word 'sensing', implying neurological activity, should not ever carry that implication.
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> dhw: In that context, our own sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing ("sensing") are all automatic processes which provide information. That is stage one. Stage two is the conscious (but not necessarily self-conscious) use of that information.-Of course. Think of our sense of sight. Electrical impulses arrive at the brain, and abracadabra, pictures in our heads! And it all happens automatically. I don't have to think to see. Much of biology is automatic reactions of enormous complexity, which is why Darwinian chance is so iffy.